Design partners — applications open
Push Shorter Loop To The Limit
We’re choosing a small number of product teams to run real work through Shorter Loop, push it until the weak parts show, and help us make them better.
We aren’t looking for companies willing to say Shorter Loop works. We’re looking for companies willing to find where it doesn’t.
This is not a beta waitlist. It is a working relationship with direct access to the people building the product.
Why design partners
The problems we still need to solve only appear inside real product organizations.
Shorter Loop already works. It is not finished. We can test workflows, integrations and happy paths ourselves. What we cannot simulate is your mess.
Contradictory customer feedback. Research nobody can find. A roadmap that changed three times. A strategic bet held together by one loud customer. A decision everyone remembers differently. An assumption that became “fact” somewhere between discovery and delivery.
That is the environment a Product Integrity System has to survive.
What we’re building
A system that can show why a product decision deserves to exist.
Shorter Loop connects product strategy, discovery, evidence, decisions and delivery so a team can trace what it is doing back to the signals and assumptions that justify it.
We can build the model. Design partners help us discover where that model collides with reality.
We want to pressure-test
- Whether the evidence behind a roadmap can actually be reconstructed
- How Shorter Loop behaves when evidence is incomplete or contradictory
- Where product teams abandon the workflow and fall back to old tools
- Which product decisions require context our system does not yet understand
- What has to be true before a team trusts the system enough to act on it
- DiscoveryCan evidence, opportunities and assumptions survive contact with messy customer research?
- ReasoningCan the system challenge a weak product claim without pretending uncertainty has disappeared?
- RoadmappingCan a team tell not only what is planned, but why it is there and what would make them change course?
- LearningCan the organization remember what it learned after the people, roadmap and strategy have changed?
The bargain
There has to be skin in the game on both sides.
There are no testimonial tiers and no referral discounts. We agree one design-partner relationship based on what your team can genuinely commit to and what we can genuinely support.
You bring reality.
- Use Shorter Loop on live product work, not a sandbox.
- Give us a named person who owns the partnership internally.
- Meet with us regularly and show us where the product slows you down, confuses you or fails.
- Let us understand the context around those failures instead of sending feature requests into a queue.
- Tell us when our assumptions are wrong, even when the answer is uncomfortable.
We bring access.
- Direct access to the founders and product team.
- Hands-on onboarding, migration and setup support.
- Early access to unfinished capabilities relevant to your use case.
- Real influence over the problems we prioritize and how we solve them.
- Design-partner commercial terms agreed before you start, including what happens after the program ends.
1
Use it
Use it on something that matters.
A roadmap, discovery stream, feedback corpus or live product decision where getting it wrong has a cost.
2
Challenge it
Show us the failure.
Not just “I want feature X.” Show us what you were trying to do, what happened and why the current behavior was not good enough.
3
Shape it
Help decide what better means.
Pressure-test the solution with us until it works in the conditions that exposed the problem.
No surprise at month thirteen.
Before you join, we agree the design-partner period, the support we will provide, the commercial terms during it, and what happens afterwards. We will not wait until you have built Shorter Loop into your operating model and then invent the price.
If it works
Advocacy comes after the evidence.
We do not need a case study as payment for joining. First, Shorter Loop has to earn one.
- A case study, if there is a caseIf the product materially changes how your team works, we may ask to document what happened. You approve every word. If the result is mixed, the story should say that too.
- A reference, if you would genuinely recommend usWe may occasionally ask whether you are comfortable speaking with another product leader. “No” is a complete answer.
- Your name and logo, only with permissionThere is no assumed publicity right hidden inside the program. If your legal team cannot approve public use, tell us at the start.
Who this is wrong for
Not every early customer should be a design partner.
- Teams who need a finished productYou will hit rough edges and incomplete workflows. We will work through genuine blockers with you, but if experimentation would put an important quarter at risk, buy it later when the product is more mature.
- Teams looking mainly for a discountThe commercial terms recognize the work and access on both sides. If the plan is to take the price cut and disappear, this will be a bad use of everyone’s time.
- Teams looking for software that confirms the planShorter Loop is designed to expose weak assumptions, missing evidence and contradictions. Sometimes that means questioning something the team already believes. If you only need a cleaner place to record decisions, this is probably the wrong product.
- Teams who cannot make time for the relationshipDesign partnership needs real access to how the work happens. A license plus one feedback call every six months is a customer relationship, not this one.
Apply
Bring us a decision you would like to be less wrong about.
We are less interested in your funding stage than in whether you have a real product, real customers, real evidence and a problem worth pressure-testing together. Seven questions. None of the answers commit you to anything.